Ace Attorney replay progress: finished Turnabout Beginnings. Still makes me angry, still for the “wrong” reasons. The reasons being the bellowing elephant in the room that’s barely given a passing mention. CW: mentions of statutory rape behind the cut.

I had absolutely no sympathy for Terry Fawles when I first played the case, and I still don’t after replaying it. This isn’t to imply that what happened to him wasn’t horrible, much less that he deserved it, but I didn’t feel the gut-wrenching sadness I was meant to feel towards it, nor the anger and hatred I was meant to feel towards Dahlia who caused it.

I’m supposed to feel sorry for this guy because he was innocent, naive, and was seduced, taken advantage of, and manipulated by a woman he loved.

Except this wasn’t a woman. This was a fourteen-year-old girl.

And he was her tutor. Her tutor at the age of 20.

So let me rephrase that: I’m supposed to feel sorry for this guy, a grown man, who had enough experience and competence that he could be hired as a tutor, who was in a position of power over a fourteen-year-old, because he was “seduced” by her and couldn’t help but listen to her every whim because he loved her so much.

I’ve seen defenses that he was mentally unstable (attributing it to his broken English), hence why he didn’t know any better than to be in a relationship with a severely underage girl, but this doesn’t add up because, again, he was her tutor. He should have been mentally stable enough to know better. And I don’t buy “The Hawthornes just had really low standards” reasoning, either. “He was naive” is even an worse reasoning.

I’m not a fan of “guy falls in love with and is unknowingly manipulated by an evil succubus of a woman” stories on the principle, there’s always this creepy, underlying misogyny that sounds like it was a tale spun by a Nice Guy, but add, “and she was underage” and there’s nothing that can change my mind that it’s anything but disgusting.